“Galatians 3.28 calls to destroy slavery”
The Non-Use of “No Male and Female”
Present-day commentators of Gal 3:28 are likely to focus on the binary pair of gender – indeed, “slave” and “free” are not commonly used designations for one’s social status in today’s world, and “Greek” is a rather narrow ethnic specification, not something all non-Jews would identify themselves with. For all the criticisms today of binary gender systems, “male and female” continue to be comprehensible categories. In contrast, for many ancient Christian writers, the ethnic and social binaries seem to have made more sense, and their comments often overlook gender. The lesser significance of gender is further apparent when Gal 3:28 is compared with other passages in the Pauline corpus that call for the abolition of social differences. While both “Greek and Jew” and “slave and free” appear in a similar list of social categories in Colossians, “male and female” is absent (Col 3:10–11). The earliest commentator of Gal 3:28 has deliberately censored Paul’s reference to the gender difference. This would be in line with the ethos of the Colossian household codes, where the place of wives is in subjugation to their husbands (Col 3:18–19). The situation is more complex, however, as Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians also leaves the male–female pair out (1 Cor 12:13). In all three letters, baptism means a renewal of life that, in some sense, overcomes worldly binaries. This teaching seems to have circulated in several forms, some of which did not include the male–female dichotomy (Wire, “1 Corinthians,” 182). The variety continues in subsequent Christian texts, where different lists of such binaries are often conflated as Ambrose writes (Ambrose, Fid. 5.14.176).
Ambrose does not comment on the abolition of gender or other social dif ferences in any way, as his point is elsewhere, namely in the Christological debate against Arians: Ambrose combines 1 Cor 15:28 (“that God may be all in all”) with Col 3:11 (“Christ is all and in all”) to argue for the unity of God and Christ. Another example of Gal 3:28 being combined with Col 3:11, this time without any reference to the gender binary, is at the beginning of Epiphanius’s Panarion. Epiphanius uses the words of the apostle as a reference to the antediluvian generations, when there was only one language and one (barbaric) opinion: “In Christ Jesus, there is neither barbarian, Scythian, Greek, or Jew” (Epiphanius, Pan. 1.1.9).
Males, Females, and Sexuality
Clement of Alexandria, writing in the late second or early third century, is the earliest Christian writer to quote Gal 3:28 extensively (Hogan, No Longer Male and Female, 13). An example of the first is represented by the followers of Carpocrates. Clement claims to have access to the book written by Carpocrates’s son Epiphanes, entitled Concerning Righteousness (Περὶ δικαιοσύνης) (Chadwick, “General Introduction,” 25). He disapproves of their teaching that wives are to be shared in common (κοινὰς εἶναι τὰς γυναῖκας; Strom. 3.2.5), which they justify with their principle of the universalism of all created beings (Strom. 3.2.6). That is, humans do not differ essentially from animals, such that there is no distinction “between female and male, rational and irrational, nor between anything and anything else at all” (οὐ διακρίνας θήλειαν ἄρρενος, οὐ λογικὸν ἀλόγου, καὶ καθάπαξ οὐδενὸς οὐδέν; Strom. 3.2.7). From this line of thought, it follows that God brought female to be with male and in the same way united all animals. He thus showed righteousness to be a universal fairness and equality. But those who have been born in this way have denied the universality which is the corollary of their birth and say, “Let him who has taken one woman keep her,” whereas all alike can have her, just as the other animals do. (Strom. 3.2.8) It goes without saying that Clement rejects the Carpocratian interpretation, which makes the equality of all Christians applicable to sexual relations (Buell, “Ambiguous Legacy,” 46). While the text Clement quotes does not cite Gal 3:28 directly, the ethos is similar. Despite using words such as ἰσότης and ἴσος, the text does not speak of equality in any modern sense of the word. According to the description, men can have sex with other men’s wives, not vice versa. Women are recognized as common property, not active sexual agents (Strom. 3.2.8).
